Holiday Gift Guide 2001
‘Tis the season for hot cocoa and caroling. For decking the halls and hitting the malls — and that’s where we come in. A new holiday season means a new chance to bring smiles to the faces of all your loved ones. And whether you’re buying for the nephew who wants everything or the grandmother…
Shabu Smiles
“If I had known you were going to make me cook,” said Momentarily Miffed Companion, “I just might have decided to stay home.” He and I were contemplating a broad, shallow pot of simmering seafood broth, set on a little gas-fired hot plate in the center of our table. To the right sat a platter…
Saving Soul
Tasty little Soul Vegetarian Central Carryout on Lee Road is closing, but never fear: The all-vegan, all-soul restaurant is relocating to bigger, brighter quarters on Coventry Road. The new venue will have a spacious carryout counter and a separate 60-seat dining room, but will serve the same large menu of sandwiches, salads, soups, and down-home…
Art Attack
People involved in resistance movements often talk about “sunshine activists”: part-time revolutionaries, whose acts of protest extend as far as their personal comfort can be maintained. Sunshine activists don’t just check the weather report before grabbing their banner and heading out to the march; they keep an even closer tab on the forecast of the…
Seeing Red
Clevelanders conditioned to classic rock may be disappointed when King Crimson plays the Lakewood Civic Auditorium this week. This is not your grandfather’s Crimson. This is a Crimson as tight and modern as it ever was. “It’s really a live band,” says Trey Gunn, who plays Warr Guitar in Crimson. “That’s where the power is.”…
Hack Work
On New Year’s Eve 1946, John Marrison set out to behead dinner — a tasty White Rock rooster. The blow successfully separated the chicken’s head from its neck, and after flopping around a bit, the bird lay still. When Marrison’s wife returned a short time later to pluck the fowl, she found it — headless…
Class Distinction
It’s appropriate that the posh suite that houses the University of Akron’s student-run radio station contains a classroom. Over the past nine years, WZIP-FM/88.1 has been quietly schooling a handful of well-moneyed corporate stations — as well as its college radio brethren — in the ratings game. A nonprofit station that receives no federal funding,…
What’s Mine Is Theirs
Rock stars and their causes — the starving Africans, the rainforest. The list goes on and on. Add to it the anxiety over land mines left over by mobile warriors in war-torn nations. But this latest bunch of seemingly self-canonizing musicians just doesn’t feel as self-serving and ego-driven as its predecessors. Maybe it’s because the…
Melissa Etheridge
Putting emotions front and center is virtually a prerequisite for singer-songwriters, and few do it with as much candor as Melissa Etheridge. Almost every little tidbit about her life is for public consumption, and this willingness to live in a fishbowl has served Etheridge well — enough to make her the No. 1 icon for…
Chief, It’s Chaos
The pitch for this one must have seemed sensational: “It’s called Spy Game, right, and it’s about this old spy who recounts, via flashbacks, how he mentored this young spy, only now the young spy is captured and about to be killed, so the old spy spends his last day with the CIA trying to…
Dilated Peoples
There are DJs everywhere you look nowadays. Except, it seems, as full-time members of hip-hop groups. You’re just as likely to spot a rock band with a guy behind the wheels of steel than a rap group with an around-the-clock turntablist. Which is one of the many good reasons to check out Dilated Peoples when…
Flaming Wreck
Though Behind Enemy Lines, set in Bosnia, was originally due for release next year, already it feels antiquated. That conflict is already a distant memory, a ghost lost in the shadow of the war on terrorism. The film tested so well that 20th Century Fox pushed up its release date, and it’s hardly surprising: As…
Local H
With all the brouhaha over the guitar/drum novelty of the White Stripes, the fact that the Zion, Illinois duo Local H has been playing the same game since the early ’90s somehow gets lost in the hype. Well, the band did start as a four-piece, with guitarist Scott Lucas, drummer Joe Daniels, guitarist John Sparkman,…
New Yakkers
This is the true story of seven people (Tommy! Annie! Ashley! Maria! Griffin! Carpo! And Benjamin!) picked to live in a city and have their lives changed. Find out what happens when people stop being polite and start being real. The Real World: Sidewalks of New York. If you came across Edward Burns’s new film…
The Flying Luttenbachers
Few bands have inspired so many hyphenated-word descriptions. “Punk-jazz.” “No-wave.” “Ear-bleeding.” “High-concept.” “Free-death.” (!) Many folks will stick with “a-tonal.” The Luttenbachers hover where free-form death metal and free-form avant-jazz (again with the hyphens) collide, as if the band’s onstage, playing for exactly one person, who keeps transmogrifying from a jazzbo to a stoner to…
Plaid Skirt Welfare
One day eight or nine years ago, Roberta Kitchen’s daughter came home from Euclid Park Elementary and said that a student had broken a teacher’s arm. At first, Kitchen assumed the story was apocryphal — that an arm in a sling had stirred playground imaginations. Though not her five children’s biological mother (their genes belong…
Smash Mouth
One day, Smash Mouth is going to release a killer greatest-hits album. Anchored by “Walkin’ on the Sun” and the ubiquitous sports-product-promoter “All Star,” that set will feature some of the chewiest bubblegum pop made at the turn of the new century, if not ever. Too bad the band has yet to make an original…
Closing the Valve
The Joseph T. Gorman reception was a soiree torn from the pages of a Tom Wolfe novel. Gorman had retired as CEO and chairman of TRW, and the evening in September was his moment to be toasted by the brighter stars of Cleveland. A photo spread in Inside Business showed Gorman mingling with Browns chief…
Kitty Margolis
Kitty Margolis makes such superfine jazz records, it leaves you to wonder why she isn’t a star. Could it be because she’s sexy, when jazz is supposed to be serious? Could it be because she plies her sparkling, musicianly trade in San Francisco, away from the jazz power centers of New York and Los Angeles?…
We’re No. 1
Eyebrows raised last week when The Plain Dealer printed a study ranking Cleveland as the nation’s 53rd best city — out of 65. It concluded that we’re poor, uneducated, and we still can’t figure out why they give you two forks at upscale restaurants, making this an unswell place to live. The paper used seven…
Mick Jagger
Mick Jagger sings like a man with Playboy bunnies in his pants and supermodels on his D, as well he should. Good work if you can get it. But such smug “Satisfaction” undermines his efforts toward a “heartfelt” and “deeply personal” solo album, as foolishly slobbering folks (hello, Rolling Stone) have branded ol’ Mick’s first…
Stop Us Before We Scam Again
On the outside, Brian Dogoldogol was a golden boy. In the eyes of his bosses, he sparkled like the glass facade where he went to work each day. He surpassed his sales goals every week, sometimes by as much as 300 percent. But in his heart, he felt like a schmuck. After all, his job…
Still Life
Still Life, the resident DJ at Spy’s Wednesday “Jungle Lounge” and the drum ‘n’ bass buyer for Grand Poo-Bas Record Shoppe, has set himself apart from other local drum ‘n’ bass selectors with his interest in working more mature, musically rewarding records into the mix along with the flavor-of-the-week floor fillers that get most crowds…
Stoning David Martin
What good’s a writer without vices? In response to David Martin’s article “The War on the War on Drugs” [November 1]: I wish a more informed, less biased writer had written the article. He refers to users as “ex-cons, stoners, and freaks.” Apparently, he was raised in the 1950s. I am surprised a forward-looking, liberal…
Fragments of Truth
If you don’t already adore that cultural icon known as Picasso, the Cleveland Museum of Art exhibition Picasso: The Artist’s Studio may do little to change your mind. All of his familiar motifs are here: the cubed and squared still lifes and landscapes, the women with bodies sprawled and disassembled, the flayed red bull’s head,…
